From snipelondon/scoop:
Just four regular commuters are now using the Emirates Air Line cable car between Greenwich Peninsula and the Royal Docks, down from 16 last autumn, new figures released to The Scoop reveal.
Only four Oyster card holders used mayor Boris Johnson’s £60m link more than five times in the week ending 19 October, triggering a regular users’ discount.
Now, what was Boris thinking when he commissioned this?
I can only assume he was thinking of the Wuppertal Schwebebahn, one of the greatest forms of public transport ever.
They wanted to link up a few towns in a steep-sided river valley, but by the turn of the 20th century, the only practical solution was to build a monorail directly over and along the river itself. Just for extra kicks, the carriages hang underneath the rail, not above it.
I've been on that, it is awesome, but of course, most people using it are normal commuters*, so for them it's no more exciting that taking an underground train is for people who take the underground every day. So you have to play it cool rather than jumping about excitedly and saying "OMG! We are in a train several yards above a river!"
* The added joy of this is that the Schwebebahn is known locally/colloquially as the "Pendelbahn". The German word "pendel" can mean two quite different things. Literally, it refers to the movement of a pendulum, but in modern parlance, it refers to commuting, i.e. going back and forth, like a pendulum. I never summoned the nerve to ask which one is meant.
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